I’m positive I couldnt beat Metal Gear Solid 4 again 16 years later. One of the final sequences involves what felt like a 15 minute button mashing section that took extremely in shape 20 somthing me to my limit. My fucking forearms cramped like a really bad period
Most games these days have a setting in the accessibility settings section to change tapping to holding, and that’s always one of the first things I check.
I was trying to think on the history of this feature, since i wouldn’t necessarily count something like AvP’s heatvision mode. That’s meant to simulate a real thing, even if it works a bit gamey, by highlighting active objects.
Assassin’s Creed is the game that, for me, codified the mechanic into it’s current form. Hawk Vision or whatever they called it specifically highlighted game objects. I think they even mention that the animus machine is projecting that view to help Desmond see the world how his ancestors would have understood it.
But… I’m going to call the origin as being way farther back. In flight sims, your targeting hud can highlight enemies and targets by drawing little boxes around them. That is the very first instance I can think of where a game highlighted objects of interest for the player’s benefit. Most flight sims (or adjacent genres like mech sims) would also label the box with the name of the thing, sometimes with health, ammo, weapon, or weakpoint indicators as well.
Assassin’s Creed also came to mind for me as one of the first time I encountered this. Eagle Vision I believe it was called.
I’d say that was different from target indicators, though. I feel those were more because distant targets weren’t really visible because of the low resolution at the time, whereas Eagle Vision was more highlighting particular items of interest in the environment that were still otherwise visible.
That’s different. The detective mode is actually useful for when you have to clear a room. It’s so good that some of the last and hardest enemies in the game are not visible while using it.
The only game where I ever found this to be cool, is the one where you literally do that to see because you’re playing as something that has no eyes and has to use echolocation.
omg I just wrote a comment about a student project with this mechanic, wishing to see it in a full production and then scrolled down and here you are telling me that game actually exists! Thank you 😁
I like the way Ghost of Tsushima handled open world navigation with their wind system. Instead of a big GPS line or whatever that takes away from the game, the wind blows in the direction of where you’re going. Very subtle and works narratively while still being able to find where you’re going easily by just observing the world around you.
It did that in a myriad of ways too, not even just the wind. Foxes take you to shrines, there are flocks of birds that indicate haiku spots, and golden parrots that lead you to pretty much any of the POIs you have not yet found. There is even an outfit that comes with a firefly that glows when you’re nearby certain rare items.
Does holding Alt in Baldur’s Gate 3 fall under this? It doesn’t have any kind of visual effect, but I do often find myself needing to use it to see what can be picked up or interacted with in the area.
I actually love this in videogames. It’s a really cool way to interact with the environment and literally see the world through a different lense with a level of control that no other medium of storytelling can achieve.
Maybe this dude should go watch a movie if he doesn’t want to interact with things.
Like most things, there are good and bad implementations and seeing it too frequently can make it become annoying. I love it for things like Alien/Predator style games that are using something from the movies, or maybe a Batman game if used in moderation.
It does get to be tedious when you can only interact with certain objects by using it first and that kind of game play can be annoying. No, I can’t think of an example off the top of my head but I’m certain I’ve run into that kind of thing before.
Dragon Age: Inquisition. I can literally see the thing that I need to loot right there, but I can’t pick it up unless I press the little pingy button first.
I played a student project game a long time ago that based itself around this kind of mechanic. It was a horror game set entirely in the dark, and the only way of seeing was by echolocation - you’d click to send out a pulse, and you’d get brief ghostly glimmers of your environment. Importantly, you couldn’t directly see anything moving - you’d have to send out another ping if you wanted to see something in motion.
Given that monsters could hear your pings too, it was a wonderful little game of cat-and-mouse deduction trying to figure out where monsters were with as few pings as possible, remembering their patrol paths in the dark, and so on. Really cool and I’d love to see that mechanic in a full game production.
(edit: apparently that full game exists, it’s called Perception, and I’m absolutely giving it a shot!)
Oh I remember seeing that in development a while back when I looked up what the BioShock devs were up to. I didn’t realize it released!
Another similar game in my backlog is Vale: Shadow of the Crown. Except instead of having a visual flash, the game relies entirely on audio cues to play and is completely blind-accessible. So completely different, but somehow feels like the same realm.
The first game I remember doing this is The Witcher 2. Not sure if that’s the first game to come up with the idea, but it’s the earliest example I can remember.
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